Web Development Perceptions
I have finished tutorial 1 and am reflecting on what I have learned, I knew most of how the World Wide Web works from my tech support job that I had for the last 7 years
but I didn’t know the details of the history behind it. I had almost no knowledge of XHTML before going through the tutorial and now I have a basic foundation to build on.
I learned how to create a web page with basic XHTML tags and elements. I felt excited that I had learned something valuable after I had put the first webpage together which
consisted of a basic title, business logo, headings, and comments throughout. I learned how to code an ordered list and an unordered list and entered code for Metadata.
Speaking of Metadata that’s one thing that really confused me at first with all the different terminology and what not.
My current perception of web design isn’t very detailed as I am just recently introduced to the situation. I have been in the technology field for several years so I perceive that
web design is in a constant state of change. I’ve seen the Web go from basic web pages to web applications and I feel that as it evolves it will be used in all aspects of our lives.
Being part of the evolution and design of something so big can surely make my life more satisfying.
Some of the occupations that I’ve ran across on the internet that are available to Web Developers are for big video game companies needing webmasters or designers.
I’ve seen IT positions where the company wants someone with knowledge of the web languages and or design skills. I haven’t decided completely what I want to do with my web knowledge
besides help my brother with his company’s website. I do know that it would be a valuable asset to have to set me apart from other IT personnel.
HTML History
I am sitting at my computer desk reflecting on the 2nd tutorial that I’ve completed. I understand now why the internet is full of links and how hard it would be to stay entertained without them.
Creating links seems to be some-what easy except when setting up an image map with links and even that is easy with the tools in Expressions.
I learned about the anchor element in creating links and the href attribute used to specify the target of the link.
Web development has come a long way with html and xhtml starting out with basic text as the only function. Now after browser wars and lazy web developers XHTML has grown into a standardized markup language
with countless functions that works uniformly in different browsers. I do remember in the early years of the internet you didn’t know if a site was going to load up correctly or not
and the browsers basically took over throwing pop-ups or “page cannot be displayed” errors. Now that XHTML is standardized most web pages work in any browser and you don’t get errors
unless Windows has done updates or your cable/phone company is having problems.
CSS History
Css has been a major player in web design in recent years because of how easy it makes dressing up Structure driven xhtml code (Xhtml gives the webpage structure telling the browser how to handle Text). I see Xhtml as a word processor for your webpage and Css as your design program. Using Css is like sending your webpage to the hair salon to get it colored and styled. Css allows you to keep your structure and style on different pages so if after you’re done with your webpage and something just doesn’t look quite as you expected, you can easily go back and add or change the design or add structured content to the page. When you use Css throughout your site, xhtml actually becomes easier to write. You don’t have to worry about using xhtml as your design program and you can concentrate on building the foundation of the site with xhtml.
Css 2.1 is the current accepted standard; Css version 1 was introduced in 1996 and laid the groundwork for cascading style sheets. Before 1995 web designers used Html to add design to their websites and I’m finding that it wasn’t easy and took a lot more code and storage space. Css 3 is the newest version that W3C still has to finalize and is currently working on. Some of the new features I’ve read about in 3 are the ability to add multiple images to the background of a single element, Also the property border-image which allows you to define an image to be used instead of the normal border.
Personally I’ve found that I enjoy experimenting with Css and seeing the different looks of my websites. I don’t think I would enjoy creating websites like I do if I only had Html to work with.
Web Design
I thought “The Principles of Beautiful Web Design” was a very informative and interesting article. I liked how the Author started to explain how to get passed the blank white screen when beginning a web site project. A lot of times that’s my problem, I’ll sit and stare at the blank screen trying to figure out where to start
The grid-design-style I found interesting and helpful in getting the layout plan going. I tried it myself while reading the article and I could see how it would help speed up the planning process and help to create a balanced web site
A balanced web site is another interesting topic the author stresses on, I hadn’t paid much attention to how well balanced the web pages I’ve created and browsed through have been but now after reading the article I understand the importance of balance. In my Typography class we have been stressing balance in page layouts and signs and it seems to have the same importance in web designing.
I think the article was very worthwhile and I found the whole article interesting. If I had to say what the least interesting thing about it would be the part about the screen resolutions and trying to create a website for all the different browser and monitor resolutions. I found the most interesting parts of the article to be where he explains the different layout styles and navigation bar designs. I enjoyed looking at all the example websites that he had posted some of which had templates that you can use in your own web design journey
Out of the Box
I was very interested in the article: Breaking Out of the Box with CSS Layouts as I have experienced the boxed-in feeling with a lot of the websites I’ve visited and watched other students create. Jina Bolton has some good techniques to make a grid layout more interesting and not so boxed in. I also like how she explained the grid layout technique and how everything in the layout is proportional. I have a couple ideas in mind how to add some images to offset the box-look in my website.
I think the Article was very much worthwhile and I wasn’t uninterested at all. The most interesting part of the article is when she writes about fracturing the grid. She writes about offsetting objects by placing them outside the column margins and creating whitespace. I did get a little confused with the entire margin and padding changes she made but I’m thinking it will be easier when I’m designing my own website and can experiment with different margins and padding settings.